


the earth is not a cold, dead place

by alekszova



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Case Fic, Drowning, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Past Drug Use, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, gavin has dermatillomania and misophonia, he's also selfish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:20:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25419832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alekszova/pseuds/alekszova
Summary: When a friend from Gavin's past ends up as the third victim of a new serial killer in Detroit, he has to excuse himself from the case. Connor, dealing with Hank's suicide, finds comfort in Gavin's presence.
Relationships: Connor/Gavin Reed
Comments: 10
Kudos: 80





	1. remember me as a time of day

**Author's Note:**

> (sort of) based on the album "the earth is not a cold dead place" by explosions in the sky.

_The earth is not a cold, dead place._

_The earth is not a cold, dead place._

_The earth is not a cold, dead place._

It is.

_It is._

**It is.**

“Detective Reed?”

He doesn’t move. He doesn’t turn to the voice. He doesn’t budge from his spot. He watches the waves crash against the rocks. Over and over again. The storm has come and gone a hundred times but the ruins in the water always remain the same.

“Gavin?” he hears the voice try again.

He tries to shut it out. He tries to will himself to have a moment of quiet for once in his fucking life.

He just wants it all to stop. He wants the world to stop. He wants everything to calm down. He wants to breathe again with it hurting. He wants his heart to be able to do its job without feeling like it’s being desiccated again and again.

“Gavin?” a whisper this time, a hand touching his shoulder.

He turns away from the water, bringing a hand up to shield himself from the bright light of the sun. No storm. Just a warm, sunny day with too much to block out.

“What do you want?”

“They’re taking the body away. I was going to head back to the station.”

“So?” Gavin says. “Go.”

“You’re my ride.”

_Right._

He looks over to the body. All covered up now as they put her on the stretcher to take her away. It doesn’t matter. He knows exactly what she looks like. He has remembered her face since the moment they met when he was a kid. He has never forgotten her.

She has forgotten him, though.

And now he’ll never be able to heal that wound. The angry thing inside of his chest constantly beating with the betrayal and the agony of being forgotten and uncared for. The thing that rages with jealousy that she had a good life and he never did. The thing that wishes he could’ve been her. So happy, so loved.

So very dead now.

“Connor?”

“Yes?”

He digs the keys out of his pocket, holding them out to him, “Can you drive?”

“Of course. Is something wrong?”

_Everything is wrong._

  
  


They’re not friends.

Connor and Gavin Reed are not friends.

But he knows when something is wrong. They’ve spent enough time together passing each other by in the station to be friendly with each other. Not friends—but friendly. Friendly in Gavin’s terminology, at least. Who has ever cared about anything else?

It’s been two years since the revolution. Connor has learned to forgive what he can and ignore the rest. Avoidance is better than anything else, he’s discovered. At least, in terms of his personal interactions. The best way to forget everything is to pop the pill designed to shut down and glitch certain programs within androids. Those things are like dreams, letting him forget who he is. Letting him pretend for a moment that anything would be better than his reality. The closest he’ll ever get to being high.

“You’re awfully quiet,” Connor says, forcing himself to speak. Forcing himself to say something rather than stay on this train of thought that always ends with the struggle of giving into temptation again.

“So are you.”

“Something happened,” he says, glancing over to Gavin. “Out on the beach. Something happened to you. What was it?”

“Just tired.”

“Is that all?”

Gavin shrugs, “I was just thinking. That’s all.”

“About what?”

  
  


_Drowning._

He was thinking about drowning.

He was thinking about how nice the relief of death would be.

He was thinking about how even when her dead body was less than twenty feet away, he was more jealous of her than he’s ever been.

  
  


Connor pins her photo to the board next to two others. Happy, smiling faces looking back at him. Filled with all these hopes and dreams. They all look the same. Bright blonde hair, sea-green eyes, pale skin. Two of them have freckles, dusted across their cheeks. One of them has a birthmark on her chin. At the crime scene for the first victim, one of the detectives told Connor what a shame it was.

_She’s so pretty. Now she’s just dead._

As if her beauty made her death a bigger tragedy.

They were all murdered the exact same way. Carved and mutilated to the point of barely being recognizable. Their faces left untouched but the rest of them so torn apart that there was little left of them. The first time they thought it was maybe animals that had gotten to the body, but she was found too far into the city to rationalize a few bears or wolves getting to her. They didn’t need the autopsy report that would state it wasn’t animal teeth that ripped her intestines apart, despite the bite marks.

“Do you think he’ll stop?” Tina asks, standing beside him.

Connor shakes his head, looking away from the images. On the other side of the board are all the pictures of their dead bodies. The same things again and again lining up between them. There was never a question that they were a victim of a serial killer. Gavin called it when they saw the second body.

_Bet we’ll have a third by the end of the year._

And they did.

Maybe it’ll be eleven. He has a sick fondness for the number eleven. Carved on the eyes of his victims while they’re still alive. Eleven slash marks over her arm, digging deeper and deeper. Eleven weeks and there’s a new body, a phone call at 11:11 in the morning to reveal the location. The voice on the phone even sounds like a child’s, which Gavin in the first listening of it joked that they were eleven years old. It’s not so funny anymore. It was never funny to begin with. Connor has learned that Gavin has a way of joking that is trying to avoid the horror of situations like these. It never makes it okay, but Connor isn’t going to blame him when they have to see something like this. Dead bodies in the city aren’t usually the work of serial killers.

And who knows really? Maybe it is an eleven year old. Maybe it’s a child android. They don’t know anything. There’s three bodies and they have no evidence on who could’ve done this. Just that they had to be strong to tear at the body like that. Brutal and vicious. Inhumane.

But not inhuman.

Connor doesn’t like the idea of blaming all the world’s cruelty on someone without a soul. He knows well enough having a soul doesn’t mean someone is incapable of killing someone.

He looks down at his hands, like the blood will reappear. Everyone can rationalize his murders away as best as they want, but he remembers every single one of them. The Tracis. Simon. Those guards at CyberLife. Maybe he was a machine just following orders, maybe he was newly deviant and trying to save his kind from being turned into mindless, thoughtless machines. Maybe, maybe, maybe. But he still knows what it feels like to take a life and he can no longer push that aside like it means nothing.

It means something. It has to.

“What’s Gavin doing?” Connor asks, looking through the glass walls, watching Gavin standing in Fowler’s office. He’d never be there if he had a choice. He’s sent anyone in his place to deal with talking to the Captain.

“He told me he was pulling himself off the case.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me. I assumed it was getting to be too much for him.”

“You think Gavin would admit to that?” Connor asks, looking to her. “Last year he broke his arm and didn’t go to the hospital for three days. He just kept calling in sick.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Connor. Even if he did tell me why, you think I’d tell you?” she asks. “He’s my best friend. I’m not breaking that code.”

“Right. Of course. I’m sorry, Tina.”

  
  


_The earth is not a cold, dead place._

_The earth is not a cold, dead place._

_The earth is not a cold, dead place._

  
  


“Gavin?”

He sits up, pushing his headphones back, the volume of the song still loud enough he can clearly make it out when the headphones slip around his neck. He blinks away the remnants of his sleep, though he never truly fell asleep to begin with. Just pretended he was. He’s sure Connor is here to tell him that he should turn his music down. It wouldn’t be the first time. He’s tried to warn Gavin before about damaging his hearing.

_Good._

He’d be better off if he couldn’t hear at all. He won’t view it as a curse. What a terrible thing it would be to trade music and voices for silence for the rest of his life. He finds too much he hates in his day-to-day life. The sound of Officer Person typing on her phone, the bubbling tapping noise that follows every keystroke. The tapping Chris does with his pencil on his desk he can handle, but the clicking noise that he sometimes turns to, hitting the end of his pen over and over again when he’s bored or thinking of something to write. He goes to the break room only at certain times with Tina when he knows the two of them will share coffee. It’s the only comforting sound in this place. Coffee being brewed. He leaves that place as soon as he can. He can’t stand to hear the sound of people chewing, so he always comes back here, puts his headphones on, drowns out the typing on keyboards and the ambient noises that some might try to find comforting in this silence.

Sometimes they even talk too much. Their voices loud and grating.

So if he goes deaf, who the fuck cares. He’d be grateful. He’s thought enough about figuring out how to do it himself just so he isn’t swarmed with the feeling of anger and hatred he gets towards people that don’t deserve it.

“What?”

“Do you want to go out?” Connor asks.

The office is empty. Maybe he did fall asleep. One of those half-dreamy states where everything goes black and time blinks out of existence. Hours pass when it feels like seconds. Cheating the system. Stealing what little he wants when he tries to dream. 

“What?”

“Just for a walk. Once down the street and then back again. Won’t take more than ten minutes.”

“Okay.”

  
  


They are never alone. Not really. They never have been. A few car rides, hanging around crime scenes or the office together, but they don’t really count. There is work tied into every action they do. Connor isn’t scared of him. He has never been scared of Gavin. The time when he felt like he should’ve been, he didn’t have the ability to feel. Even reliving the memory doesn’t bring fear to him. He would’ve survived, no matter what. Nothing would’ve mattered. And despite it all, Gavin is not a scary person. He is angry and vicious, but he isn’t frightening.

“You wanted to talk?”

“Yes,” Connor says. “Fowler told me you were off the Eleven case.”

“You want to know why?”

Connor hesitates before he nods, “It’s not like I think you owe me an explanation, I’m just worried.”

“Worried?”

“Whenever you get a case, you always have a theory. You have a dozen, if people let you talk long enough. You talk about their clothes or their defensive wounds. If the broken heel on their shoe means they were running from something or if it was just an accident. If the rips on the clothes were a fashion choice or…” he trails off. He realizes the way he’s saying this is like Gavin treats all victims like a mystery to figure out. Not a real one, but like a book, when the details don’t matter because the victim isn’t real.

Gavin’s never like that. When he poses his theories, most of the time there is always a layer of concern hidden underneath his voice. The only time he didn’t have that was at the Eden Club. When the victim was a sleazy guy and the android was just—

A piece of machinery.

“You didn’t say anything,” he says quietly. “About the victim this time and now you’re off the case and I know you.”

“Do you?”

“I know you well enough to know you wouldn’t willingly leave a case unless it was important.”

“You don’t have to worry about me,” Gavin says, turning around to head back to the station. “I’m taking care of myself.”

“Clearly,” Connor replies, calling after him as he continues to walk away. “You know taking care of yourself can mean talking to people, right?”

Gavin lifts a hand up, flipping him off without even turning around.

Connor doesn’t know why he bothers.

  
  


He sets the plastic bag down on the counter, taking out the boxes and lining them up in a neat row on his countertop, all turned the same direction. Precise and orderly before he empties them one by one, sorting out the different sizes into the plastic case. Smallest ones to the right, largest to the left. He should keep a box of them in his car. He always plans to and he always forgets.

Gavin pushes the container away from him, leaning against the counter with his head in his hands. He feels the tears inside of him boil up, pressing hot against his eyes and he tries his hardest to shove them back. He doesn’t want to cry right now. It’s such a stupid thing to cry over. But he can’t get anything right, can he? He can’t do anything right.

Who gives a shit about the stupid bandages, who gives a shit about anything.

She’s dead.

She’s dead and Gavin is still alive.

Who fucked up something like that?

  
  


Connor doesn’t mean to spy. It’s by virtue of him being an android that it happens. He’s designed to pick up on little details. Everything and anything that he can in just a glance. So he doesn’t mean to notice Gavin’s fingers bandaged up so heavily. Half of his digits with bandages wrapped around his fingers, plastic wrappings tossed into the can underneath his desk. He isn’t bleeding. Connor notices that just about as quickly as he notices the bandages spread out on his desk. A little black case with them spilling out.

He’s bandaging himself but there’s no blood, no wound that Connor can tell exists.

He pulls together his pile of folders. A few different cold cases that he works on in his spare time. Now he doesn’t have any and Gavin is left without anything to do. It’ll help fill his time. Make him look busy, at least. They’re all things that Fowler didn’t consider worth the manpower. Not when the deviancy case took over. A few robberies at a gas station that seems to be a hotspot. No camera, no security. Just reports every few weeks. He stands up, moving to Gavin’s desk, setting them down gently.

“What’s this?”

“Work.”

“Great,” Gavin says quietly, wrapping the last bandage around his thumb. “You can go now.”

“I—” he pauses. “What happened?”

“What?”

“The bandages. What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” Connor echoes. He watches Gavin’s hands as they move to pick up the files, move them to a different corner of his desk, straighten them. Nails kept short, too short, probably. There’s a scar across the back of one of his hands in the shape of a crescent moon. Tattoos peek out from the sleeve of his shirt.

“You weren’t ever a kid,” Gavin says, not looking at him. “So you probably don’t get it. But when I was twelve me and my friends all thought it was cool to wear bandaids on our hands. Make us look like we just got in a fight. Real tough.”

“And now that you’re old enough you spend a portion of your paycheck on disposable accessories?”

Connor is still watching his hands, watches them drop to his lap, a finger tracing something on his knee. _Accessories,_ Connor thinks, but he can’t be certain. The way Gavin writes out the letters are so loopy, so small and overlapping each other that it’s hard to tell.

“Sure. Why not?”

The real question is why he’s bothering with lying to him. _Why not?_ Because Gavin is the one that harasses Ben for his plastic water bottles. He’s the one that told Fowler they needed a recycle bin, especially with how much takeout everyone gets. Making sure the plastic containers are rinsed out before they’re sent away to be melted down and used again. He’s the one with the reusable ziplock bags, the electric car, the one who doesn’t eat meat.

Though he’s always been made of contradictions. He is still the one smoking cigarettes and leaving the butts out in the alley, the one who mostly eats from the vending machine. He’s one of the few people in the station that still asks for paper files. Maybe this is just another thing in the long list, but Connor doubts it.

He always seems to doubt Gavin.

“I have a question for you.”

“Another one?”

“Yes, another one,” Connor says. “Nobody at the gym will train with me. The other detectives think I’ll hurt them.”

“Have you hurt someone before?”

Connor would laugh if the question wasn’t so horrifying to answer. Of course he has. But Gavin isn’t asking about _before_ he’s asking about the Connor now. The one who’s new deviancy wore off and his emotions were supposed to balance out. But they didn’t. They never have. But the deviant defense was something that helped thousands of androids be free from abusive homes. No amount of anyone pretending they cared about an android would carry on with the truth. They were slaves. Most of them were physically attacked. Where Connor can rationalize one thing with Gavin, most can’t excuse years of being pushed around and screamed at or assaulted.

“Last time I was there I almost broke Chris’ nose and I bruised Tina’s shoulder.”

“Right,” Gavin replies. “I remember them talking about that. That was almost a year ago.”

_A year ago._

Back when Hank had killed himself, back when Connor felt an anger he hasn’t felt since. Something that tore him apart, that made everything blur into nothing but rage.

“Yes.”

“And you haven’t gone back since?”

“No,” he says. “There’s been little reason to. I need to train. A punching bag isn’t going to tell me anything.”

“A punching bag isn’t going to punch back, you mean. You want to fight someone. You don’t want to train.”

“Will you agree or not?” Connor asks. “I’ll help you with your cases.”

“I don’t need your help,” Gavin says, sitting up. “I’ll train with you. I haven’t been back in a while, either. And punching someone sounds nice.”

“Maybe you’ll have a real reason to wear those then,” he replies.

Gavin rolls his eyes, turning back to his work, flipping through the files. Connor takes his leave, moving back to his desk, wondering why he asked. Why he was suddenly so struck by the idea of wanting to go back and train. He doesn’t like fighting. He doesn’t like the reminder. He doesn’t like not knowing how hard he’s hitting something. He supposes that’s both a reason to never go back again and to train as much as he can to control it.

  
  
  


Gavin hasn’t logged onto Facebook in a decade. It’s like blowing off the dust of an old photo album. Pictures of him and his brother from when they tried to reconnect. Pictures of his mother before she died. Pictures of his first apartment, his childhood vacations, his friends that he used to consider the best people in his life that he’d never lose. Pictures of the two of them, faces pressed cheek-to-cheek with smiles breaking them open.

It’s weird, seeing everyone else’s lives moving forward. People with kids, people married, people with new friends and fancy jobs and living half-way across the country. And he’s still here, in Detroit, hating every second of it. Nothing changed for him. Nothing will ever change for him.

But he isn’t on here to catch up with old friends or look at old notifications of birthdays and babies. He came to look for her.

He was removed from her page a long time ago, back when he still actively used the website. Posting videos of his favorite songs and when he used to get excited for movies. Back when he had things to look forward to instead of living one day to the next just trying to get through it. People always told him that, like it would help.

_If you don’t want to live, if you really want to kill yourself, just try for one more day. And if you can’t find a reason to live through today, find a reason to live through the next hour or minute or second._

How many minutes is he forcing himself to live through? Ticking them by one by one. The feeling never goes away. The desire to fucking end it. It’s always there. It’s always going to fucking be there. It’s never going to disappear. Doesn’t matter what he does. Doesn’t matter how hard he tries to pretend.

Gavin tries to focus on finding her page, as if it will do anything but make this worse. It always made it worse. He used to look at her Instagram and her Twitter just to see how she was. She’d take week long or month breaks from posting anything and he’d start to worry she was dead. He’d never be friends with her again, but it never meant that he wanted her dead. He avoided her Facebook as best as he could, though. She posted pictures of her family there. He learned that a few years after they stopped talking. Her perfect baby and her new husband. There’s none of them now. Just messages of people mourning her death. Prayers that her daughter will make it through this okay. She’s an orphan now.

Gavin never even knew the dad died. Maybe he would’ve if he hadn’t done his best to erase her from his memory five years ago and pretend she never existed at all. Maybe he could’ve been there for her. Would that have changed anything? Or would it just have pissed her off that he reached out to her? He wasn’t trying to stalk her. He just wanted to make sure she was okay. All he ever wanted was for her to be okay.

Gavin leans back in his seat, looking at the photograph of her and her daughter set as her header picture. They look so similar. Same blonde hair, same sea-green eyes. But her daughter doesn’t share the birthmark, but it’s still like looking at her yearbook picture from when they were seniors.

He closes out of the app on his phone, shutting his screen off and pushing it away from him like it’s a time bomb about to go off.

There’s no need to ever go back to her profiles again. Not after this. Not checking up on her anymore, making sure she’s okay and alive and healthy. 

He mourned the loss of his relationship nearly eighteen years ago. He mourned the loss of his friendship for a long, long time after. It was something that was much more difficult to get over than a romantic relationship that meant very little to him.

But now all that’s left is to mourn _her._

  
  


They take it easy on each other for the first few matches in the ring. Neither of them hit too hard or take shots when they could. A tentative dance between them as they warm up throughout the time spent together. Each time they get there faster. One of these days, when they step into the ring, they aren’t going to pull their punches. Gavin is just going to hit Connor square in the face and knock him on his back.

It’s such a funny idea that he’s distracted by the mental image of it and Gavin hits him in the stomach and he stumbles back a step. Not because it hurts--Gavin never hits him hard enough to actually hurt, just that it took him off guard.

But Connor knows he’s been hitting Gavin too hard. He can’t figure out the right line to reside in. How much pressure to use. Make sure he doesn’t cause any more bruises on Gavin’s body. So far he hasn’t, but he sees them appear on Gavin’s thighs when they go into the locker room to change their clothes. Various ones in different stages of healing.

He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t have a right to ask.

But he wonders.

Wonders if those little fist-sized bruises are from Gavin’s own hands or someone else’s.

  
  


They get an anonymous tip about the case. An unknown caller says they saw someone on their street burning bloody clothing in their backyard. It’s not really enough to give them any reason to even think it’s their killer. There are enough murder cases and enough misunderstandings that the evidence could be tossed in a heartbeat, but the person on the phone is convinced it’s the Eleven killer because the number _11_ appears on both the house and the license plate.

It’s a reach, but they are still sent to investigate it. Connor sits in the car with Tina watching the guy from down the street, waiting and waiting for absolutely nothing. All the evidence should be tossed by now. He won’t take another girl for at nearly ten weeks, when he’ll keep her for eleven days and torture her until he’s decided he’s done with it.

“Could’ve just been from an accident in the house. One time my brother put his arm through the glass window on our backdoor. Needed fifteen stitches. Bled everywhere. Looked like a murder scene,” Tina says quietly. “Or maybe it was just paint. My sister painted her room red a few years back, when I was still living with my family. She had the paint bucket on the top part of the step ladder and it tipped and spilled all over her shirt. Completely ruined it.”

“Any other tragedies in the Chen house?” Connor asks quietly.

“No. Well, there are plenty, but…” she trails off. “I just don’t want to get my hopes up that we can finally stop this guy, okay? I hope it’s him. I hope we can nail him before he kills another girl. But if it’s not we’re wasting our time and he’s still out there probably stalking the next girl to take.”

“Yeah.”

“’Yeah’?” she scoffs. “That’s all you have to offer? You sound like Gavin. Spending all that time with him must be rubbing off on you.”

“Maybe.”

She reaches over, smacking his side. “Come on, Connor, talk to me. He isn’t. Tell me how he is. Tell me about your meetings.”

“They aren’t anything special,” Connor says. “Just training.”

“Nothing romantic?”

“No.”

“Just friendly?”

“Barely that.”

She nods, tapping her fingers against the steering wheel. “I’m pissed at him. Can you tell him that? I’ve needed him these last few weeks and he hasn’t said a word to me. Tell him to call me.”

“I will,” he says quietly. “Promise.”

“Can you promise to tell me if anything about your relationship with him changes, too?”

“Sure.”

“Pinky swear?” He holds up his hand, letting Tina wrap her pinky around his tightly. “Thanks. And thanks for being there for him when I can’t. He can’t be trusted alone, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

Tina shrugs, pulling her attention back to the quiet house. “He’s always had issues with… staying alive. Kind of like you.”

He doesn’t argue with her. It’s almost comforting that she’s noticed at all. His _issues with staying alive._

“Just do me a favor and if he ever makes a joke about killing himself, shut him down, alright? Make sure he knows that it’s not funny. That people want him around.”

Connor thinks he would anyway, but the serious look on her face makes him know how real she’s being.

“Has he tried to kill himself before?”

“No. But I know he’s gotten close. Far too close.”

“Okay,” he whispers. “I’ll shut him down. I promise.”

  
  


“What are you looking at?” Gavin asks.

Connor pulls his eyes away from him, blue blush creeping up on his cheeks, “Nothing.”

“Nothing,” Gavin repeats, giving a small laugh. “Never see a guy naked before?”

“You aren’t naked.”

No. He isn’t. He still has his jeans on. But this isn’t the first time he’s caught Connor staring at him while they changed into their gym clothes. He’s sure Connor has seen the scars and the bruises, positive he has questions about the tattoos, the markings on his skin. He just doesn’t bring it up.

He likes that about Connor.

Almost as much as he likes that Connor’s annoying habits are manageable in a way others aren’t. He never needs headphones to shut out sounds around him. It’s been a while since Gavin has been able to say that about anyone.

“Tina told me you should call her.”

“Tina?” he scoffs. “You two getting all buddy-buddy on your mission, then? It’s only been two days.”

“It’s not like that’s the only time I’ve talked to her. But she would really appreciate it if you talked to her.”

“Sure,” he says, knowing it’s a lie. “I’ll call her later.”

But he can’t and he won’t.

What is he supposed to say to her?

_My friend that isn’t really my friend and hasn’t been my friend for nearly two decades died. Can you give me a shoulder to cry on?_

  
  


The fist lands against his jaw, knuckles hitting bone, sending him stumbling backwards for a moment. His vision fills with static, black and dark before clearing away to normal again, to Gavin standing a few feet away with his hand cradled against his chest. The pain still lingers on his jaw, but he knows his skin has reformed around it, turning it back like nothing happened at all.

_“Fuck,”_ he murmurs. “Fucking hell.”

Connor reaches a hand up, touching the spot that was hit, the pain easing away slowly but the place remaining tender, aching whenever he presses too hard against it, “I told you not to hit me without the gloves on. Android bodies are made of a rather durable plastic—”

“Shut up. You broke my hand. Fuck.”

Connor doesn’t bother correcting him. It was mostly Gavin’s fault. He was the one that forgot his gloves. He was the one that insisted on still sparring together despite it. He was the one that threw the punch. It’s Connor’s fault for letting him do it, though. He could’ve left. He could’ve put up a better fight. He should’ve been able to dodge the punch, but his thoughts aren’t here. He heard the news about their only lead being a dead end. No way it could’ve been the guy. They have footage of him at work like he is every day when the bodies were being disposed of. Tina was right.

Waste of time.

“Let me see,” Connor says, reaching out to him. “It’s probably not broken, but let me check.”

Gavin looks at him, annoyed, for a long moment before holding his hand out towards Connor. His hands are gentle when they take Gavin’s. Fingers brushing along his palm, pressing his hand flat as he scans it.

“Not broken,” he says. “You’ll be fine. It’ll hurt for a while. You probably bruised the bone.”

“Bruised the bone? The fuck does that mean?”

“It’ll hurt really bad for a long time, but you’ll be fine.”

“And if I’m not?”

“Go to the doctor’s. What do you want me to tell you?”

He doesn’t say anything. The two of them go quiet for a long moment. Gavin’s hand in Connor’s. Rough calloused palms against his perpetually smooth ones. Never showing any signs of wear to them. Underneath it might. His plastic shell might be completely destroyed and Connor wouldn’t know. He tries his best to pretend that it doesn’t exist. It helps.

There was a time, once. After Hank died. His emotions got the best of him. He couldn’t stop crying and it was as though his systems couldn’t handle the influx of pain, couldn’t keep the skin formed around his body. Just kept cracking and breaking like he did on the inside. Then he took the pill and it all faded away. Little perfect remedy.

He hasn’t taken it since. One wasn’t enough. He always wants more. He just knows how dangerous it would be to get it.

“Are you going to let me go?” Gavin asks.

“Do you want me to?”

Gavin stares up at him for a moment, tugging his hand free, “I should go.”

“What about your hand?”

“I’ll take twenty advil and down a bottle of whiskey and I’ll be fine.”

“I hope you’re joking,” Connor says, watching him pick up his bag with his good hand. “You’ll kill yourself doing that.”

“If I die, I die.”

“Gavin—” he calls after him. “Gavin, you can’t joke about that.”

Gavin raises his hand up, not looking back at Connor as he flips him off before pushing the door to the gym open, retreating outside to the rainy city.

  
  


“Does your hand still hurt?” Connor asks.

“Hm?” Gavin mumbles, looking up to him, then to his hand. The bruises on it have faded significantly, turning his skin an ugly array of colors that aren’t quite normal yet. “A little.”

“Can I help?”

“How are you going to help?”

Connor sits down in the chair across from him, setting his bag on top of the pile of folders. “Hank used to have pain in his hands often. I would help.”

“How so?”

“Massages.”

“Hand massages?”

“Yes. They helped,” Connor says. “It’s not as weird as it sounds. He liked them.”

“I bet he did.”

“Gavin. Can I help you or are you going to be obnoxious the entire time?”

“It’s all I know how to be, Connor.,” he says with a smile.

“Why?”

“Easier that way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t play stupid, Con,” he says quietly. “You’re an android. You should get it. Especially with Hank. People leave.”

And it’s easier to keep people away than to have them and lose them. Then he never has to demean himself with begging for a scrap of their attention. To have whatever they had before, especially when he never had them. They always had him. And then he fucked it up and they dropped him in a moment.

“I’d rather have friends, Gavin. It’s better to have loved and lost than to never loved at all.”

He hates that fucking quote.

“You believe that? After Hank killed himself?”

“I have to,” Connor whispers. “Give me your hand.”

Gavin moves his chair closer to the desk, holding out his injured hand for Connor to take. He doesn’t argue with it. The idea of having some of his pain eased sounds appealing, and nobody has touched him in—

Well.

He can’t remember.

That simple fact is enough to lodge something in his throat. He tries to keep himself from breathing because each shallow intake of breath feels like it’s going to make him cry. He can’t fucking cry. Not here. Not in front of someone. But he is stuck in this loop, trying to remember the last time someone hugged him, the last time someone held his hand. He can’t remember when the last time someone bumped his shoulder or hit his side when he was walking through the store, either.

And here Connor is, gentle fingers pressing gently against his palm, moving along to his wrist and back again. So much attention to easing little stresses of pain that Gavin had grown so accustomed to that he had forgotten it was there in the first place.

“The bandages,” Connor says. “It’s to stop you from picking at your hands, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“Dermatillomania. You have it, don’t you?”

“I don’t know what that is.”

Connor gives him a look that he can’t read. Connor either believes that he’s an idiot or believes that he’s trying to pretend he isn’t flawed beyond repair.

“Obsessive-compulsive need to pick at your own skin,” he says quietly. “You don’t have to be ashamed, Gavin.”

“Sure I do. That’s how I was raised.”

“To be ashamed about yourself?”

Gavin nods.

“Were your parents religious?”

“No. Well… my dad was. But not in a real way. He didn’t go to church. He sort of just used God to defend anything he felt.”

“Did your parents know about this?” Connor asks.

“No. I never told them.”

“So you never got help.”

“Like they would’ve let me,” he whispers. “They believed any excuse I gave them. Woodshop class? That’s why I was always bandaging my hands up. So they didn’t have to see it and wouldn’t yell at me for using up the bandaids, which are the only thing I can do to stop myself. My clothes smelled like cigarette smoke because I hung out with the older kids when I was waiting to get picked up after school. I didn’t have money because I was saving it up for something special, which they’d always forget about eventually. Wasn’t eating dinner? I had a snack after school and now I’ve killed my appetite. Sleeping in late? Just stayed up until four in the morning, that’s all. I learned to make excuses because telling them the truth just resulted in them yelling at me. Telling me I just needed to learn some self-control. That I was selfish or stupid for doing anything at all. What a fucking waste I was, existing. Eating their food, spending their money.”

“Gavin…”

“I didn’t mean to say all that,” he whispers. “Can you pretend you didn’t hear any of it?”

“No. I can’t. I’m worried about you.”

“You’ve said that before. Why?”

“You’ve always been… distant. Angry. Sad. But ever since that woman died—”

“Stephanie.”

“Stephanie,” he echoes. “You haven’t been the same.”

“Yeah,” Gavin replies. “You’re right. It’s not something I like to talk about.”

“Because you knew her?” Connor whispers.

“Yeah. I did.”

“How?”

He feels his face crumple, tears springing at the edge of his vision as he looks away, “I can’t tell you that, Connor.”

“Why?”

“There are things that are just… impossible to repeat. Okay?”

“Did she do something to you?”

“No. Never. Stephanie was a sweetheart,” he pulls his hand away from Connor’s. “I think you should get back to work.”

“Gavin—”

“I can’t talk about this,” he says, standing up. “Not right now. Not with you.”

“When, Gavin? Who? You can’t bottle up everything inside.”

“Look who’s talking,” he replies. “Have you talked to anyone about Hank’s suicide? No. You haven’t.”

“Nobody ever offered to listen to me. I’m offering to be here for you, Gavin. Let me be here for you.”

“I don’t need you,” he says, his voice loud, angry, cracking through the silence like a whip. “So please leave me the fuck alone, Connor.”

  
  


He doesn’t want to be alone. He never wanted to be alone. All Gavin ever wanted was someone to love him unconditionally. His mother is dead. His brother doesn’t talk to him. His father hated him. Every single person he works with only talks to him to pass time. Nobody loves him.

And it’s all he’s ever fucking wanted was to feel loved and be able to show that love to someone. Everything is locked up inside of him and every time he tries to talk about it people think they understand but they don’t. Nobody ever fucking understands anything.

People say he isn’t alone, that there are other people that feel this way, but what good does that do for him? To know that there is some stranger out there laying in their bed at night crying themselves to sleep wishing they could just kill themselves already? What good does it do to know how tormented everyone in the world is?

He’s so fucking selfish and cruel. So unlovable. So ugly and repulsive.

Nobody has ever wanted him in their life.

And he’d be so much better off dead. The pain would end. Nobody would have to deal with his shit anymore. Eli wouldn’t have to make those sporadic phone calls throughout the year, so often forgetting Gavin on his birthday, missing him on Christmas. It would be over.

Every obligation anyone has ever had would be gone.

_Why the fuck wasn’t Stephanie the one to live?_

She was so kind and beautiful. So incredibly funny and thoughtful. She had a daughter. She had a life. She made a difference. She made a difference and she didn’t deserve to be torn apart like that. She didn’t deserve any of the pain. None of them did.

And now he’s never going to have her back again. He can never even entertain the idea that she might message him one day and ask how he is because she’s fucking _dead._

She’s dead and he’s alive and he still wishes he could walk into the ocean and never come back again.

  
  


“Hello?”

“Hi.”

“Is everything okay?”

“…”

“Gavin?”

“No. Can you… can you come over?”

“Sure. Ten minutes?”

“Okay.”

  
  


Connor steps in, watching Gavin as he moves back to the counter, sitting on the stool, moving spices around on the rotating rack from where they litter the counter in front of him.

“What are you doing?”

“Rearranging.”

“Oh,” Connor says. ‘Did you call me for that?”

“No,” he says, looking up. “It just… helps sometimes. When I get frustrated, cleaning helps. Organizing helps. I thought they’d look better if they were grouped by color. Paprika, cumin, cinnamon.”

“Okay.”

“Thyme, oregano, basil—”

“Gavin?”

He nods, leaning back away from it, glancing up to Connor, “You offered to listen once. Is that offer still available?”

“Yeah. Of course.”

Gavin crosses his arms, leaning back against the wall behind him. “We went out. She was my girlfriend for a few years. My friend for a long time before that. Everyone loved her. She was perfect.”

“But you broke up.”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“A lot of reasons, Connor. I can’t list them all.”

“List one.”

“She wasn’t my type.”

“You said she was perfect.”

“She was. Just not for me,” he says quietly. “Connor?”

“Yeah?”

“I didn’t call you to tell you about her.”

“Why’d you call me?”

“Well,” he says, his voice small, muffled. Drowned by the tears he won’t spill. “Were you being serious? About being here for me?”

“Of course.”

He’s shaking. His leg bouncing against the edge of the chair, his hands digging into his forearms. New bandages wrapped around different fingers. Closed off. Scared. Afraid.

He’s never seen Gavin cry before. Connor supposes he still hasn’t, but he knows the face he’s making. Twisted up, chewing on his bottom lip, trying so hard not to be obvious about how he feels.

“Do you want me to stay the night, Gavin?”

He doesn’t look up to meet Connor’s gaze. He just nods.

  
  


There is a quiet silence in his actions during times like these. His inability to speak. Just him and his heavy heart. He never really knew what that meant until one day, when he felt like this, it hit him. That this weight on his chest was what people meant by a _heavy heart._ It’s weighing him down. It’s pressing in on him. It’s making it hard to breathe, to move, to speak.

Gavin helps Connor make up a bed on the couch, though Connor tells him he doesn’t really need to sleep like a human does. He could just stand in the corner when he rests, but the thought of coming out here in the morning and seeing Connor in the corner shut down like that borders too close to horror movie territory, so he forces Connor to lay down and gives him an extra pillow from the closet.

He makes a huge effort to avoid the box in the corner, homing all his old photographs and trinkets. Things that make him too upset to look at but can’t bring himself to throw away.

When they say good night, Gavin comes to his bedroom, turns off all the lights, sinks to the ground just inside of his room. His body feels weak and numb. Pushing aside the need to cry for so long that now when he’s alone the tears won’t come. But it’s all he wants. It’s all he wants to do to curl up and cry in here.

And he can’t.

It’s so fucking stupid. How angry he can be at her and at the same time bending and breaking himself to excuse it all. And how fucking callous it is to make her death about him. She was ripped apart by a serial killer and he’s in here wishing he could cry over the fact she wouldn’t give him the time of day. But even that he knows isn’t true. He has spent a long time looking at the pictures of the dead bodies that came before her wishing he could be alone in a room with that man so he could tear him apart the way he tore them apart.

They didn’t have to be pretty or kind or mothers to have their death be a tragedy. They just had to be people.

He stands up, looking at the time as he leaves his room. Two hours passed of wallowing on the floor in the dark and it felt like nothing more than a few seconds. Time fucking flies when he’s being a self-pitying asshole.

Gavin moves to the living room, spying on the form in the dark. Asleep, probably.

He hesitates. Takes a step forward—

“Gavin?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re watching me.”

“Yeah.”

“You want to come over? Talk?”

He nods, unsure if Connor can see the movement in the dark, but he still comes to the couch as Connor sits up, taking the seat on the far side. Scrunched up as small as he can be, as far from Connor’s side as possible.

“I’m sorry I hurt you,” Connor says quietly.

“What?”

“When we were training yesterday. I’m sorry I hurt you. I should’ve been more careful. I should’ve told you to wear your gloves. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I’ve had worse,” he whispers. “Broken ribs. Drowned in a lake. It’s fine.”

“Somebody tried to drown you?”

He bites his tongue, nods slowly. “Stephanie’s older brothers invited me over about a week after we broke up. They said that since I broke her heart…”

“They tried to kill you?”

“I don’t know if they wanted to kill me, but I don’t think they would’ve gave a shit if I died,” Gavin sighs. “I wrote her letters.”

“About the drowning?”

“No. Well—yeah. I wrote her a bunch of letters. I heard that it helps with closure. Getting all your feelings written out. It’s different from thinking it. Making them real, I guess. Seeing them in print. It changes things. So I wrote her letters. A couple of them when we were still dating.”

“What did they say?”

“That it was a fucking mistake that we were ever together, mostly,” Gavin whispers. “Even if… she was my type… we’d never match up, you know? I’d never be good enough. Now I’m certainly not. I speak without thinking. I’m a fucking dick. All the time I’m just… so angry about everything.”

“You regret being with her?”

“Every day,” he says, his voice breaking. Every day he regrets showing her those vulnerable parts of himself. He’ll probably never make it to a day when it’ll stop.

“Why did she matter to you so much?” Connor asks. “I’m sorry, I don’t… I don’t mean to sound horrible. But she’s just one person. This was… eighteen years ago that you broke up?”

_Fuck._

He didn’t even realize how much time had passed.

“She was my best friend, Connor. She was the only person I ever talked to. She was the only person I ever trusted. I could tell her everything. So I did. After we broke up, she said we could be friends, but the next day I knew everything was different. She didn’t talk to me at school. We would text sometimes, but she stopped replying. It’s not like I needed to talk to her every day, you know? But we used to talk constantly. Like enough that my mom actually got an unlimited texting plan so my dad wouldn’t yell at me for going over the limit. Then we broke up and it was so… quiet. No texts. Nothing. The person that I told everything was gone. I guess that’s it. Even Tina… we’re friends but I haven’t told her even the bare minimum. Stephanie was the only person I could trust with—” he cuts himself off before he says them.

Deep dark secrets that need to stay buried.

Like how his father abused him. Like his mother’s illness. Like his jealousy towards his brother.

She’s the only person he told about his issues with sound, his compulsive behaviors. She was the only person that even came close to understanding those things. She was the only person that made him feel like he was someone. She was the only person that made him laugh during those years, and the only person he trusted to help ease the pain of his day to day life. If he texted her saying he was upset, he could trust her with those feelings and she could trust him.

He thought she could trust him.

He doesn’t know why he’s trusting Connor with any of this, either. Maybe because Connor has a kindness. A way of keeping secrets. Worrying about Gavin. Being here at all. He felt so close to ending it tonight. A thread a moment from snapping. He doesn’t think he would’ve. He’s always been a coward. Too scared to pull the trigger, too frightened to dig a blade deep into his wrists. Gavin wouldn’t have killed himself. But he’s glad Connor is here.

And now everything inside of him is cracking open, a chasm opening up. Words spilling out. Different from thinking it or writing it down. So entirely different. Actually having someone hear the words--

It’s a relief to get them out.

“I know I put her on a pedestal,” Gavin whispers. “I know that. I know I should’ve let it go a long time ago. And I did. It’s—It’s been a few years since I’ve really thought about her. She sort of faded from my thoughts. I used to think about her all the time. How I didn’t love her the way I was supposed to.”

“Not so much anymore?”

“No. I stopped thinking about her but I didn’t let her go.”

Not like she let him go.

She said they’d stay friends but a week later her brothers tried to drown him and her messages became so infrequent and rare over the course of a few months that he just chalked it up to finals, and then to graduation, and then to going off to college. He kept holding his breath on holidays and birthdays thinking maybe she’d say something. Sometimes, he’d forget about her for a few weeks. Then, randomly in the middle of the month, Gavin would remember her and think for a moment, maybe she’d send him a random _I miss you_ text like he sent her.

But she never did.

She never missed him.

He didn’t matter to her the way she mattered to him.

He buried this all as deep as he possibly could and tried to forget it but it’s all back again. Every part of it is back at the surface, suffocating him. The girl he loved, dead, and now he can’t even apologize for how cruel he was to her. He never sent her the angry letters that detailed how hurt he was that she vanished so easily, but he still felt it. Full of rage. Jealous that she could have brothers who would care so much about her. Angry that so many things in his life was tainted by her.

He just wants to apologize to her so badly. He thinks about it constantly. How unfair he was to her. How he couldn’t see it from her side and only his. He has no idea why she left. He just assumes that it’s his fault. He still thinks it is.

That’s another reason to apologize, too.

Apologize that he is the way he is. That he scared her away. That he couldn’t be here for her. That he couldn’t stop someone from kidnapping her and torturing her and tearing her apart piece by piece.

“Gavin?” Connor says quietly. He reaches forward, stills Gavin’s leg from shaking. It doesn’t help. It just makes the tremors feel like they are bone deep, cracking him open. Turning him to dust. When Connor pulls away, he doesn’t shake his leg again. He’s trying his best not to. “This won’t be the end.”

“She’s dead.”

“I know. But it’s not the end of your life. You can still be happy. You deserve to be happy. You should grieve for her. You should mourn. You’re allowed to be upset. But you have to understand that this is still your life. Eventually you have to look ahead for yourself.”

He’s already so fucking selfish.

_You deserve to be happy._

Does he?

_Does he?_

He’s restless. Upset. Not angry but something bordering it. He traces the word _eventually_ over and over again on his knee.

_Eventually eventually eventually—_

“Are you moving on from Hank?” Gavin asks.

Connor smiles softly, “Eventually, maybe I will.”

  
  


He offers to come back to Gavin’s place after work, but he’s rejected and reassured that Gavin will be fine without his babysitter. Connor is partially upset over this and partially relieved. It’s nice to not be alone. His apartment is devoid of everything but a few things for Sumo, who perks up when he comes back like he always does. Like he’s waiting for Hank.

A week after Hank died when he was emptying out Hank’s place and finding one of his own, he screamed at Sumo. Yelled at him that Hank was never coming back. That he was stupid for even thinking about it. He felt so horrible, looking at Sumo’s sad face staring back at him, that he had sat on the floor, holding onto him tight, crying until there was nothing left inside of him anymore.

He hasn’t cried about Hank’s death in a long time. Sometimes he wonders if that’s a betrayal in and of itself.

“Come on,” he says quietly. “Let’s go for a walk, okay?”

They wander around the block together, the weather cool enough that neither of them mind spending far too much time outside. Resting in the park, walking the circuit, sitting down on bleachers by a baseball field that nobody is ever playing on.

_Are you moving on from Hank?_

He doesn’t know. He lets Sumo off the leash, tossing the ball across the grass, watching Sumo walk on after it. A fast-paced trot and back again.

Does Sumo remember him? He must. He couldn’t have forgotten Hank. Nobody ever could.

He picks up his phone, dialing his voicemail, pressing play, letting it run through it’s list of messages he’s saved.

— _“Hey, Connor. We have a case so I’ll meet you at the station in fifteen. See you then.”_

_— “Sorry, bud, I forgot we made plans for dinner. I hope you’re not some lonely android sitting at that shitty burger shop. I’ll be there soon. I’ll make it up to. Thirium cake, if that kind of thing even exists.”_

_— “Con… I… Sorry. I’m going to try again.”_

_— “Still not picking up? Jesus. What’s the point of you having a phone if you never pick it up?”_

_— “Okay. This is my last shot. I was hoping to be able to talk to you, but I guess not. Sorry. I—I left you a note in your room. You’ve been so busy with work all day, covering for my sorry ass. I’m sorry. You don’t deserve that kid. Look, I’m going to run out of time soon, aren’t I? I just wanted to tell you I love you. The note says more. But I do love you. And I’m sorry.”_

_Sorry. Sorry. Sorry._

“Sumo,” he says, his voice quiet, small. Sumo doesn’t hear him but he can’t speak any louder. “Come here.”

Sumo is too busy laying in the dirt, chewing on the tennis ball. Connor’s body is too weak to carry him over, so he settles for wrapping his arms around his waist, letting himself be the stupid stranger in the park bawling by himself.

  
  


There’s no news on the case.

Every day they go by with nothing is more painful than the last.

But Gavin knows the cycle.

Eventually, his concern for the case will die out, muffled by other things. Lost in the shuffle until another dead body is left in the middle of nowhere.

It’s a never-ending cycle of violence.

Fucking hopeless.


	2. can't we just listen to the silence

They haven’t been back to the training room in a while. Connor was giving Gavin’s hand ample time to heal, though he should’ve been fine a while back. He’s sat by Gavin’s desk more than once, taking Gavin’s hand in his, running his fingers along the bones. It’s more of an excuse to touch him than it is to actually help him. He thinks that’s probably wrong, but he doubts the massage would do anything more than irritate the pain of the bone or the bruised flesh anyway.

But Gavin lets him, even offers up his hand like he’s awaiting a ring.

Today is the first time they’ve been back, Connor pulling on his gloves, watching Gavin turn his own over in his hands.

“I don’t think we should do this anymore,” he says quietly.

“What?”

“I think training together is a bad idea,” Gavin says, looking up.

“Because you hurt your hand?”

“No. Because of you,” he steps forward, setting the gloves down on top of his bag. “You wanted me to hurt you, didn’t you? That’s why you didn’t care about the gloves. The padding makes it so the punches don’t really hurt. You wanted to hurt. You’re not in this to learn, you’re in it because of the pain.”

Connor watches him closely, doesn’t say a word. He didn’t think of it that way, but he remembers when Gavin’s fist connected to his jaw. Knowing how little that wound would show, especially in such contrast to the injury Gavin sustained.

“You hurt yourself,” Connor says.

“What?”

“The bruises. You hurt yourself, too.”

“That’s different.”

“Is it?”

“Yes,” he says quietly. “It’s… It’s different.”

“Tell me then.”

Gavin sighs, looking up at him, “Connor…”

“Please. Tell me. I’d like to understand.”

He stands there in silence, unspeaking for a long moment before he finally turns away, “People don’t get it when I try to tell them. So I’m used to whatever reaction you’re going to have, alright?”

“Okay.”

“There are… there’s this…” he pauses. “It’s called misophonia. Sensitivity to sound. Extreme emotional reactions. Some people have anxiety. Some have rage.”

“You have rage.”

“Yes,” Gavin whispers. “Some things set me off. I don’t know how to control it. But when it happens, sometimes the only way to get the edge off is to break something.”

“So you hit yourself?”

Gavin turns back to him, nodding slowly. “It helps. Better than it boiling up inside of me. I know that from experience. I don’t talk it out on anyone but myself.”

Connor thinks of those bruises on his thighs. Fist-sized. Different stages of healing. He’s hitting himself hard enough to bruise and he’s doing it often enough that his skin could be used as a teaching point for medical students.

“Can I ask you to stop?”

“Stop hitting myself?” Gavin shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t know how else to deal with my anger.”

“I could help you. Different methods.”

“Is that going to help my impulsivity, too?”

“It might.”

Gavin nods, “You have to promise me something, then.”

“Anything.”

“We have to stop this,” Gavin says, picking up his glove.”Fighting each other.”

“Okay. Deal.”

“Deal,” he whispers. “You want to head out then?”

Connor nods, pulling his gloves back off. “Let’s go.”

  
  


He sits alone in his apartment, shuffling pictures from the different crime scenes together, noticing the similarities and differences between the victims. Yes, they look identical, but they were all left in vastly different places. Stephanie by the beach, the first victim in the middle of a park, the second in an old warehouse at the edge of the city.

Connor stares at the photos as though they’ll tell him who did this, but no evidence was ever left at the scenes to indicate a specific person. Everything was all too common and accessible. No fingerprints, no blood. Teeth marks on the victim meant little. Bite marks are the least damning evidence even though they are the only thing that could lead to a specific person. The way human bodies are, their skin, making a mold of the teeth wouldn’t prove anything.

They won’t find anything of their killer on the bodies, but they will find the bodies on the killer. Swatches of hair are missing. Pieces of their organs are gone. Possibly eaten, they said, considering the bite marks, though it really means little. It could be anywhere. Stored in jars as trophies. Sold on the black market.

They won’t know until they find him, and maybe he’ll never reveal his secrets anyway. The only thing they have to bank on is the fact he only has three victims. Based on how they’re displayed and reported, it’s unlikely that he would keep any secret.

But there’s also the question of this:

Taking care of the bodies was so expertly done, the level of brutality in the kills--

The idea that this was his first attempt is hard to believe, too.

They should look into other crimes. Maybe women that reported being kidnapped and tortured but escaped. Serial killers often abuse sex workers, maybe if they questioned them… but with the Eden Clubs and their rules of wiping memories, maybe all of his abuse was directed to them.

It’s worth a shot, but Connor feels sick to his stomach at the idea of investigating such a thing. He doesn’t want any part of it.

Tomorrow--

Tomorrow he’ll talk to Fowler.

He’ll get himself off this case. He has to. He’ll quit if Fowler doesn’t let him. He can’t do this anymore. He can’t look at their photos for another second. He can’t stand the idea of how incapable he is at doing the one thing he was built to do. These women died because there are still people out there able to skirt their way around the system and get away with such depravity.

  
  


“Hey,” Connor says, leaning against the desk beside him. “Would you like to go to the movies tonight?”

“Shouldn’t you be working the case?”

“You know as well as I do that all of our leads are dead ends,” he says. “Nothing on the fibers, all common things. Phone call doesn’t trace back anywhere. Nobody saw anything and if they did, they’re too scared. We have nothing. And… I took myself off the case.”

“You what?” Gavin asks, sitting up straighter. “The fuck did you do that for?”

“Well,” he says quietly. “I’m too close.”

“You didn’t even know her.”

“But I know  _ you.” _

“That’s not enough, Con, and you know it. Why did you quit the case?”

He holds onto the edge of his clipboard tightly, clenching his jaw, his voice quiet and even—

“It’s been a year today. Hank killed himself a year ago today. I’m not helping anyone in this state.”

He looks to Gavin’s hands, watching them twist against the fabric of his jeans, flattening out again. One hand tracing a slow, messy word against his knee. Not a word. A phrase.

_ A year ago today, a year ago today— _

“You’re the best detective this stupid shitty place has.”

“Not right now. Maybe if I’m feeling better…” he trails off, looking away. He was going to end his sentence with  _ I’ll pick it back up again when the next body shows up. _

He doesn’t want another body to show up. He wants someone to take this off his hands. He wants to be able to close his eyes and not know what a woman’s insides look like shredded to pieces.

“Movies?” Connor asks again. “Tonight?”

Gavin nods, “Sure.”

  
  


“Are you mad at me?” Connor asks, waiting outside in the line to buy the tickets.

They haven’t even picked what they want to see yet. They should’ve prepared more. Connor just wanted to go somewhere. Do something that didn’t involve talking. And he wanted to be with Gavin. He knows the grieving they are undergoing is not the same, but it’s comforting to not be alone. It’s nice to not want to resort to taking pills and letting his systems glitch close to being irreparable.

“For what?”

“Quitting the case.”

“No. And I don’t want to talk about it,” he says. “I know you’re all obsessed with us talking about shit and it helping us sort things out, but that’s… too soon. And there’s plenty of other stupid shit in my past that I’d rather talk about if you’re offering to be my therapist.”

“Friend.”

“What?”

“I’m offering to be your friend, not your therapist. I think you should attend therapy, though. It would help you. You might feel more comfortable discussing things with someone who can actually provide you with—”

“Alright, knock it off.”

“I’m not joking, Gavin,” he says. “You… you’re incredibly upset all the time. I think it would help. Some of the reasons we don’t tell our friends our feelings is because we don’t want to burden them. A therapist is equipped to deal with that.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

“I’m not saying that I would feel burdened if you would open up to me, though. I’d be happy if you opened up to me. You never talk about anything. I mean, granted, we don’t hang out very often, but…” Connor trails off. “I’d like to know you, that’s all.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“I’ll let you know me, if it’ll make you happy.”

“It would.”

Gavin looks up at him, the smallest hint of a smile. The closest Connor has gotten to anything real and positive from him in some time. He reaches out, takes Gavin’s hand and squeezes it gently.

“Can I ask you something, Detective Reed?”

“Can’t believe you just went from sappily calling me your friend to referring to me as  _ Detective Reed.” _

“I like the way it sounds.”

“I don’t.”

“Okay. Sorry. Gavin. Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“Is it alright if I spend the night with you? It might have to be at my place. I don’t like leaving Sumo alone and tonight it seems especially cruel. But I really don’t want to be alone.”

“Okay.”

“You’ll come over?”

“Yeah. I’ll come over.”

  
  


Connor doesn’t let go of his hand during the movie. Gavin’s grateful. He doesn’t pick at his skin, doesn’t tear away at his nails, doesn’t trace random words on his legs, though he does shake his left one almost the entirety of the movie. But it’s okay.

Because Connor held his hand.

Because Connor invited him over.

Because he heard Connor laugh at something completely stupid in the movie and he saw him smile when the couple got together and he didn’t have to hear the sound of someone chewing popcorn and covering his ears and trying to lip read or hitting himself, biting his hand or digging his stupid, short stubby nails into his palm for relief.

When they get back to Connor’s place, they share the bed when they go to sleep. Connor doesn’t have a couch, and in all honesty, Gavin is surprised he even has a bed, though Connor tells him it’s mostly because of Sumo. Because he has to make room for him at night to climb up there with him.

Tonight, Sumo resigns himself to the dog bed in the corner of the room which looks more like a pile of blankets than an actual pet bed so there will be enough room for the two of them. Gavin lays on the far edge of the bed, watching Connor watch him.

Quiet and dark and terrifying.

He hasn’t felt this way in a long, long time.

He’s never dated anyone after Stephanie. He hasn’t shared a bed with someone in his entire life, save for maybe the moments when he was a child and his father wasn’t home so he could safely sleep beside his mom when the nightmares came, which were just as frequent then as they are now.

It’s different with Connor.

He wants to move closer.

He wants to touch him.

“Gavin,” Connor whispers. “What did you mean when you said you didn’t love Stephanie the right way?”

“Just that she wasn’t my type. That’s all.”

“What does that mean, though?” he asks. “Why would that prevent you from loving her the right way?”

“I didn’t love her romantically.”

“Because she wasn’t your type?”

“Yes. That’s what I said.”

“But what is your type, then?”

Gavin sighs, closing his eyes, shutting out Connor’s curious face.

He could lie. Make up something extremely different from Stephanie. Some person with a different personality, different ways of showing her love, different appearance. Different everything.

Or he could tell Connor the truth.

But he’s never told anyone that truth before. He doesn’t even know how to say it.

Sure, he’s gotten online, sometimes had fake personas. Blogs that he could vent on before deleting things almost immediately. Maybe he could say things there. But out loud?

He’s never said those words together. Doesn’t matter if the world says it’s accepting or not. He hasn’t trusted any of it with a single person. Not even Stephanie. Least of all Stephanie. He was supposed to be in love with her.

“Gavin?”

He opens his eyes. Looks at Connor’s big brown eyes staring back at him. Confused. Wondering. Waiting.

“I don’t…” he pauses. “I don’t like… girls. I’m…”

“Gay?” Connor fills in for him.

He nods, feeling tears prick at his eyes. He still can’t say it. Can’t voice it. But he’s glad that Connor can. Glad that someone can put the word into the void for him.

“I didn’t know.”

“I don’t make a habit of telling people. Barely told myself.”

“You can only lie for so long,” Connor murmurs. “Are you afraid of what they’ll say?”

“No,” he says. “Yes. I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem like their business.”

“What if you were dating someone?”

“What do you mean? Like Stephanie? I guess it was her business, yeah. But I didn’t really know then. I just knew I was supposed to be with her.”

“No, I meant other than Stephanie.”

“She’s the only one I’ve been with.”

“Nobody else?”

Gavin shakes his head, “Don’t act all full of yourself, Con. You haven’t been with anyone either.”

He smiles softly, “Yes, I just… I just thought I was the only virgin at the DPD.”

Gavin laughs, reaching over and hitting Connor lightly on the shoulder, “Fuck off. Go to sleep. Christ. I didn’t come here to be bullied.”

“I know. I wasn’t bullying you.”

“Shut up,” he says quietly, still smiling, still feeling the faint edge of laughter in him.

He doesn’t know why it strikes him as so funny. Maybe because it’s the middle of the night and it’s dark and it’s Connor and despite the fact that one year ago today Hank killed himself, he can find some small sliver of happiness right now, in this moment. Not a good day, but an okay day. An acceptable day.

It’s been a long, long time since he’s had one of those.

  
  


_ The earth is not a cold, dead place. _

_ The earth is not a cold, dead place. _

_ The earth is not a cold, dead place— _

Maybe not.

Maybe it isn’t.

Maybe there is still hope.

  
  


“Tina, I’m off the case—”

“I know,” she says, pointing to the screen. “But the women were taken eleven days before they were killed. He keeps them and tortures them for eleven days before he dumps them. We’ve been sending out their pictures to everyone we could to see if anyone could remember them and…”

She presses play on the video. The blonde woman stumbles forward along the sidewalk path outside of a gas station. She isn’t wearing shoes. She looks half dead. But the date in the bottom left says it was the day she was kidnapped. Maybe just before. Maybe just after.

Stephanie.

“Someone drugged her,” Tina says quietly as the video plays her pushing the doors to the gas station open, falling to her knees just inside. “The clerk remembered her face but her supposed husband comes by a moment later and says that she’s high and he was trying to take her to rehab.”

“Weird cover story,” Connor says. The man that Tina mentions is running fast towards the doors, picking her up, holding out his hand towards the clerk. No audio, but the camera quality isn’t bad. They can make out his face, though the grainy quality will mean some imagination will have to be used to decipher who he is. “Why are you telling me?”

“So you can tell Gavin,” she says, her voice quiet. “He won’t talk to me anymore. He ignores all my messages and calls. Won’t even look at me when he’s here. I think he should know. That’s all. Did you tell him to call me?”

“I did. Doesn’t mean he listened,” Connor says quietly. “Tina—”

“He is always so sad about being alone,” she whispers. “He never lets anyone actually be with him to prove he doesn’t have to be. So just tell him again, okay? Because I can’t keep trying to talk to him and being shut down.”

“Okay.”

  
  


Connor doesn’t have a key, but he comes over often enough now that he probably should have one. It’s annoying to always have to get up and unlock the door, though there is a moment when he opens it and sees Connor on the other side that makes him—

Happy.

Happy that he’s actually there. No delivery man or neighbor telling him his television is too loud. Just Connor. Just Connor coming to see him.

“Hey.”

“Hi,” he says. He looks serious. Sullen. “I have a question for you.”

“Don’t you always?”

“Why haven’t you talked to Tina?” Connor asks.

He hasn’t come inside yet, despite Gavin taking his usual step back to let him in. This strange divide between the two of them opening up like a chasm more and more.

“What?”

“You told me that part of the reason losing Stephanie hurt so much was the promise that you two would stay friends when it was all over. That it hurt so badly because she didn’t keep that part and you lost the only piece of her that mattered to you,” Connor says. “Right?”

“Yeah.”

“So why aren’t you talking to Tina? Why are you leaving her behind? Why are you doing to her what Stephanie did to you?”

“I—” he stops. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know how to say it.

“She keeps telling me to look out for you. To see if you’re okay. She’s told me multiple times that she misses you. And I’ve told you and you just… haven’t done anything about it. Why?”

“Because I’m a hypocrite. Because I’m a piece of shit.”

“No, it’s something else,” Connor says quietly. “Just tell me the truth. You can trust it with me.”

He bites his lip, turns away as he moves further into the apartment. He can’t bear to look at Connor when he speaks, “Because I didn’t think she’d care.”

“She does.”

Gavin looks back to him, his hands together in front of him, his nail digging into the skin by his thumb. He’s been okay for the last week. Long enough for his hands to heal and look normal again. His nails are still short. They’re always short. But he doesn’t have any bandages on his hands. It’s one of those rare inbetween times when his hands heal from the damage he’s inflicted on them, though it won’t last long. It never does.

“Gavin?” Connor whispers, taking a step inside. “Talk to me. Please.”

“I don’t think I’m really somebody people care to have as a friend,” he replies. “Forgettable, you know? Or only memorable for the shitty parts.”

“You’re not forgettable. You’re not shitty.”

Gavin tries to smile, shrugs off the comment. “Come on, Connor.”

“No,  _ you  _ come on,” Connor says, stepping into the apartment. He reaches out, takes Gavin’s hands in his, stops him too late. He’s already peeled back the skin on his thumb, left it exposed and raw and bleeding. Not a lot. Just enough for it to be considered a  _ real  _ wound. “You aren’t as terrible as you think you are.”

“But I’m still terrible.”

“You make terrible jokes. Sometimes you’ve made bad decisions. Sometimes you’re too angry or too closed off but you aren’t a bad person. Far from it. I’ve seen how much you work to do the best you can. You twist yourself in knots to make it seem like you’re the villain in every single situation. You aren’t. Stephanie did a horrible thing. You’re allowed to think that. You’re allowed to feel hurt by her actions.”

“If I’m angry at her, I’ve got to be mad at myself for doing it to Tina.”

“Sure. Be mad at yourself for that. But you have time to fix it. It wasn’t eighteen years that you stopped talking to her, it was a couple of months, Gavin. Not forever. Fix it. You can still fix it. Just talk to her. Answer her questions. Apologize. Stop… feeling like you’re smothering people just because you care about them.”

“Okay,” he whispers.

He doesn’t believe Connor. Not in the least. But he’ll try to. He’ll pretend he can believe him for just a little while. He’ll call Tina tomorrow. No, tonight. When Connor leaves. And if Connor doesn’t leave, he’ll call her from the other room. He’ll text her, too. Let her know.

“Do you want me to get some bandages for you?” Connor asks, running his finger along Gavin’s new wound. Such a heavy word for such a small thing. It doesn’t even really hurt.

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“Of course. What are friends for?”

  
  


Gavin has a beautiful smile when it’s real. Connor feels content taking a snapshot of it, keeping it safe next to ones he has of Tina and Hank somewhere that his heart should be. He watches him laugh and joke and throw Sumo’s ball across the field, chasing him in circles, playing tug-of-war with the toy that he brought with him.

It makes Connor wish Hank could’ve seen him. He knows they weren’t close before. Gavin attended the funeral and he was upset about Hank’s death but—

They weren’t close. They never were. Connor wishes they were a little bit. He wishes Hank were alive to see Gavin change from being so angry and vicious all the time to smiling like this. He wishes he could talk to Hank about how he feels, too, because he doesn’t quite understand it.

He sees Gavin and…

He thinks something inside of him is breaking, but in a good way. There’s an instant moment where he smiles when he sees him. When he feels a little lighter with Gavin around. It’s the only thing that brings him some peace and positivity at the DPD these days.

Tina no longer passes messages along to Gavin through him. They don’t talk like they used to, but they don’t ignore each other, either. It won’t be the same. Not that soon. Connor doesn’t think if Gavin disappeared he would be able to go back to this that easily, either. Tina said she was angry. That doesn’t always go away with a simple apology. Gavin broke her trust, the same way Stephanie shattered his.

  
  


“Why haven’t you ever dated anyone?” Connor asks as they walk back to his apartment together. “After Stephanie… why didn’t you ever date someone you could actually love?”

He shrugs, looking over to Connor, “Why would I? Every time… every time someone gets close…. All I can think of is when they’ll eventually leave or die and I’ll be alone again. Maybe that’s selfish but I don’t believe in that phrase.  _ The better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all? _ I’ve loved and lost. It destroyed me. It still destroys me. I think…”

“What?”

“I think it’s the only thing I know. How to destroy myself. I don’t think I know how to go back from that.”

“You never healed from losing Stephanie.”

“No,” he whispers. “No. I don’t know how to. I kept thinking I’d finally let her go and then… suddenly I would have a dream about her. And it would just be us hanging out like we used. Listening to music together. Talking about the future. And I would wake up overwhelmed by it and message her and sometimes she’d get back to me. Not often. Not right away. But sometimes. She’d say hey back and apologize for not talking and then… she’d disappear again. But she never once contacted me first,” he says, his voice breaking. “It’s just every few years I would miss her so much I wouldn’t know how to stop myself from wanting her. And she’d respond but… it never lasted. She’d always go weeks and then months until I had to beg her to say something. I know that isn’t right. I know it isn’t healthy. But it’s my own fault. It’s my own shitty brain.”

Just like that--

Cracking open again.

All his insides spilling out once more.

“Gavin—”

“Don’t,” he whispers. “Just let me hate myself, okay?”

“I don’t know if I can let you do that.”

“What else is there to do? You can’t stop it,” he says. “I’m always going to be like this, Connor. I’m always going to hate myself. I’m always going to feel worthless and pathetic. I’m always going to feel like I could’ve done more and tried harder and succeeded. I’m always going to regret fucking everything.”

“You can get help, Gavin. You can get better.”

“I don’t want to get better, Connor, I just want to die. I just want to be dead and feel like… like it’s finally over. You have no idea how relieved I was when Stephanie’s brothers tried to kill me. You have no idea what I felt when I was drowning. I thought—it was finally over. All those people saying that they change their minds at the last second and all I could do was be so incredibly relieved that I could just finish it.”

“You still feel that way.”

“Of course I do. It’s only gotten worse. It’s all I can fucking think about. You can’t save me, Connor. You can’t fix me.”

“I can try.”

“No,” he whispers. “I’m not your do-over. You can’t fix me up and feel better about failing Hank, okay? You just can’t.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want to change, Connor. I’ve never wanted to change. It’s not because I can't, it's just because I won’t. You should count yourself lucky you don’t love me.”

“And if I did?” Connor asks. “If I loved you—”

“Stop. Just stop. Please.”

“I’m not going to let you hurt yourself.”

“Connor—”

“Live for me,” he whispers. “Just live for me. Live for me when you can’t find any other reason.”

“I can’t burden you like that.”

“You can. I can take it. I can carry it. I’m strong enough, I promise.”

“Okay,” he whispers. “Okay. I will.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

  
  


Hank’s grave is a sad thing. Cold stone sitting in the cemetery side by side with Cole’s. Connor leans down, placing a bouquet of flowers on each of them. He doesn’t know why he does it. He never understood why humans do it. But there is something good about it. Something that feels like he is giving kindness to two souls that desperately need it.

He always stops by the other women’s graves, too. None of them are in this specific cemetery. They’re all sporadically placed around the city. He drives far too long on the weekends to visit them all, to leave a quiet apology that he couldn’t keep working the case.

It never feels like enough.

It never feels like he is sorry enough.

  
  


“I want to see her,” Gavin says quietly, pushing his cup of coffee further away from him.

The taste has grown so much more bitter than it usually is. He adds as much sugar as he can so it tastes sweet, but nothing is changing the flavor. Ever since Stephanie died, all he can think about is how much it reminds him of her. She was one of those teenagers that had a cup with her every time she went anywhere. Thought it made her cool, maybe. It worked.

It was also probably the only reason he wanted to drink it at all.

“Who?”

“Alice. Her daughter,” he says, looking up. “I want to talk to her. I know I don’t have any right and I shouldn’t but… I just want to see her. Let her know she isn’t alone.”

“Have you talked to Connor about this?” Tina asks.

“No. He’d just tell me I should go if I wanted to. I need someone to talk me out of it. It’s a stupid idea.”

“I can play that part if you want,” she says. “But you should—”

“Talk to Connor. Right.”

“You know the only reason he supports you in your every stupid decision is because he cares about you, right?”

“I know.”

“Why do you keep acting like you wish he didn’t?”

Because it is easier to isolate and be alone.

When people leave it hurts.

When people stay it gets his hopes up.

“Tina, I’m…” he pauses, tries to find his words. He’s thought this through a few times. Thought about how horrible it would be to say it and have someone yell at him, call him disgusting, throw him out. Thought about how someone might laugh and say they already knew, make him feel stupid and humiliated. “Have you ever loved your best friend?”

“Of course. You’re supposed to love your best friends. I love you.”

“Tina. That isn’t how I meant it.”

She looks down at her hands, away from his face, on the chipped nude polish on her fingertips. “You love him?”

“Yeah.”

“Terrified that if he really knows, you’ll lose him? Never get him back?”

“Yeah.”

“I know how that feels,” she says, looking up. “I know exactly how that feels.”

And the way she says it, Gavin doesn’t need to know that she’s single, that she’s as lonely as he is. He knows how it ended for her. The same way it ended for Gavin with Stephanie. How they had a great friendship and they ruined it by thinking they were supposed to have more. 

But it’s funny, how little this changes things. How all it does is make Gavin love Connor still. How he wishes he could cut that part off of himself, shove it down the drain, keep what they have. Maybe he’ll never have a romantic relationship for the rest of his life. Maybe he will pine until the day he dies. Maybe he’ll see Connor in relationships and feel a jealousy that wants to tear him apart. All of that would be better than losing him, or having him and then pretending once again that when it ends it doesn’t end forever.

It always ends forever.

It never goes on.

  
  


Neither of them talk about what they said before. They have a few times they come to see each other that they both cut short because it’s too difficult to be around someone after they both said stupid things. Connor still feels it. He still thinks it. That he might love Gavin. That he can carry that supposed burden.

He would carry anything to keep Gavin alive. He’d carry Gavin’s body until his legs gave out.

It’s the main reason why seeing him is so difficult. Knowing that Gavin doesn’t believe it. Connor keeps making excuses to leave but tonight he can’t. Tonight he doesn’t want to be alone. His clothes are still wet from the light rain in the cemetery, his body weighing three times heavier than it should.

Gavin lets him inside when he knocks on the door, lets him shed his jacket and his shoes and settle on the couch with a blanket and a movie and the quiet between them. They’ve been rewatching things from Gavin’s childhood. A few spare things that he says are still good, still hold up, are probably one of the few positive things he remembers about being a kid.

So they watch animated movies over and over again.

Or—

Really, one of them watches the movie, sleepy and content and the other watches the watcher.

Tonight it’s a back and forth. Every ten minutes they trade off.

Connor tugs on the blanket that they share, moving to lean his head against Gavin’s shoulder.

“I think I hate my job.”

“Me too.”

And nothing more. The brief conversation is enough for Gavin’s hand to find Connor’s, for the rough bandages against his palm to comfort him, for the quiet sound of the movie to lull him further and further away.

  
  


They found him.

Gavin gets the call when he’s walking home from the grocery store, juggling three bags and the cellphone as he listens to Tina tell him in a rushed voice that someone recognized his picture. A neighbor. He’s coming in for questioning, they’re going to get a warrant to search his place, but they have a suspect and he looks exactly like the picture.

They found him.

They found him before another woman had to die to lead him there.

And all Gavin wishes was that they could’ve found him and stopped him before the first was ever taken from her family and friends to begin with.

  
  


They send Connor with the team to investigate the house. He’s one of the best and his reasoning for being off the case isn’t enough for Fowler to not reassign him back to it again. So he’s with the other investigators, walking through the building slowly, looking at the signs of wear and tear on the place. Connor only agreed to this because when they were standing in the middle of the station and Fowler gave his orders, Gavin gave him this look like he was begging him to go without a fight.

So he does.

It’s an old home. Two stories and narrow. He doesn’t go upstairs, doesn’t look too long at the family photos lining the hallways. Just heads down to the basement with the rest of them. Past the door with the five locks removed and set aside. Down the rickety stairs to the sound-proofed walls and concrete, the boarded up windows.

Connor tries to work as best as he can, but he doesn’t have the stomach for the case like he used to. Seeing the table in the middle of the room, stained red, is too much. Seeing the album of polaroids of the victims makes him feel like crying. He can barely do his job. It was a mistake to put him back here again.

But he’s the best and he isn’t allowed to say no after everything he did. After he didn’t pick up the phone and save Hank like everyone wished he had. If he had just answered, if he had just come home—

_ Over here,  _ the investigators say as they find a new horrible addition to this basement made up of nightmares.

Look at this blood, look at these hair clippings, look at the tools and the pictures and the books that detail his fantasies.

Look at it all.

  
  


They don’t exactly get a confession from the man. Not really. They get hypothetical responses, but the way he breathes and moves when they bring up the crime, when they show him the photos—

He’s aroused by it.

It makes Gavin sick to his stomach to watch it and he has to leave before he can see whether or not he admits to the crime. All he wants is to run away. To throw up.

So he does.

He runs away.

He throws up in the bushes down the street.

And he runs, runs, runs until he gets to Connor’s apartment and sits outside and waits.

Waits all by himself for his android to come back from seeing more horrific things.

  
  


“I was looking for you,” Connor says, turning around the stairs. “You were here all along?”

“Yeah. You didn’t call.”

“I did. You didn’t answer. You left your phone on your desk, you know. I found it when I came back. Then I heard you ran out of the station like someone was trying to kill you.”

“Talked to Tina, huh?”

Connor nods, “I didn’t think you’d be here.”

“Why’d you come? Give up on me?”

“No,” he says. “I’d never give up on you. But I have to feed Sumo. Take a shower. Then I was going to look for you again.”

“Where did you go?”

“Your place. Knocked on your door for thirty minutes trying to annoy you into answering.”

“I wouldn’t have made you wait thirty minutes.”

“No?”

“No,” he says, looking to the floor. “I couldn’t wait that long knowing it was you.”

Connor moves over to his side, taking his keys from his pocket, nudging Gavin’s shoe with his foot. “Come on. Get up. I’ll make you something to eat.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Come inside anyway.”

So he does.

He follows Connor inside, sits on the couch and watches Sumo scarf down his food. Listens to the sound of the shower running for far too long, his eyes closing but never falling asleep. Not tired enough for that.

When Connor comes back out again, he orders Gavin food, forcing him to eat it. They don’t say anything, but he knows what Connor is thinking.

That Gavin is a sad, stupid boy that’s run here to get away.

And he’s right.

“Tina told me something when I was at the station,” he says quietly. “The guy confessed finally when they let him look at some of the evidence from the basement. It was like a bargaining chip for him to see it one last time.”

“Yeah?”

“She also told me that she took the job to inform the remaining family members that they found the killer but that she wouldn’t go to see Stephanie’s daughter. That you should.”

He feels his body grow cold as he looks up to meet Connor’s gaze, “Me?”

Connor nods, “I can drive you. I have the address. And I know you probably want time but…”

“But she shouldn’t be forced to wait. I got it. We can go.”

“After you finish eating.”

“Right.”

  
  


The drive through the city to the suburbs on the other side is a long one. A winding path through traffic and rainy weather. Every light turns red just before they get there. Connor doesn’t mind. There is something comforting about the quiet nature of the car, the radio turned just low enough to barely be heard over the engine and the rain, the sound of windshield wipers squeaking against glass.

Neither of them talk, but at a particularly long wait in traffic, Gavin holds onto Connor’s hand. Stretched across the console, resting against his restless leg, the shaking of it blurring into the rumble of the car.

He doesn’t mind.

The visit they are making is a good one, despite the horrible things behind it, despite it all.

Finding Stephanie’s killer won’t change the fact she’s dead. Connor knows that. But it means another woman won’t die. It means that it’s done for. That it’s over. This part of it, at least. There will still be the trial, but the evidence is damning. He won’t get out of jail in this lifetime.

  
  


Connor stays in the car when they arrive. Gavin stands outside, knowing how little he looks like a detective dressed like this, with his tired eyes and his badge hidden behind his jacket. He wants to throw the stupid thing into the lake and never see the it again, but he can’t. He needs to turn it in when he quits.

The door opens and for a moment, his thoughts pause. He’s eighteen again, sitting in Stephanie’s living room, listening to music and filling out college applications for schools he won’t get into but will pretend he’s smart enough to manage. He’s happy again. Just for a moment, even if every moment with her was cut by the fact that it wasn’t quite right and it would never be quite right.

But she looks just like Stephanie.

So similar it hurts.

“Hi,” he says. “Alice, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m Detective Reed. I came to talk to you about your mother’s case.”

“Okay,” she says. She’s leaning against the door, hasn’t opened the screen that separates them. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything. “What is it?”

“We found him. Her--the… killer. Took him into custody early this morning. He confessed.”

“You came all the way out here to tell me that?” she asks.

“Well—” he pauses and nods. “Yeah. We inform the families when there’s a development in the case.”

“Detective Chen always called me.”

“Yeah, but… I knew her.”

“You knew my mom?”

“Yeah. We were friends when we were kids. I just thought…”

“You said your name was Reed?” she asks. “What’s your first name?”

“Gavin.”

Alice pauses for a moment, as though she’s trying to sift through every interaction she’s ever had with her mother to uncover at least one mention of a Gavin or a Reed.

And then she says:

“She never mentioned you.”

Something cracks inside of his heart. Another thing in the long list of things. Another reminder that she mattered more to him than he could ever to her. Alice is her daughter, though, why would she ever say anything about Gavin to her? Why would it ever be brought up? Because she was his best friend? He was just a boy to her. He was just somebody that passed through her life.

“Okay,” he says quietly. “Detective Chen will keep you up to date on the case. I just… wanted to tell you.”

“Sure,” she replies. “Thanks.”

Gavin moves away from the door, bounding down the steps of the porch, racing to the car, throwing himself inside.

“Let’s go.”

“Gavin—”

“Let’s just go, okay?”

  
  


Gavin quits two days later. He tells Connor this over the phone and to pass the message along to Fowler, though it does little good because Fowler packs up his things and leaves the station for three hours, coming back only to say  _ Yep, he’s quit  _ and that’s all there is to it. No two weeks notice. Just gone.

Connor doesn’t blame him.

When they returned to Connor’s apartment after he visited Stephanie’s daughter, all Gavin did was break down and cry. Shaking and trembling so bad Connor thought he was going to fall apart. He tried to hold him together, to tell him it would be okay, but in the end the only thing that seemed to help was the kisses Connor kept placing against Gavin’s forehead and his cheek and rocking him back and forth.

Gavin cried himself to sleep, passed out on the bed after an hour of this, but he didn’t sleep for long. He was gone when Connor woke up. He hasn’t seen him since, only talked to him on the phone. At least Connor has that. The phone calls. Gavin promised them to him if Connor would stay away for a little while. It’s enough, for now.

But sometimes all Connor wants is to see him again. The days keep passing by too slowly. Connor walks Sumo towards Gavin’s apartment and back again, never going inside, deciding to respect his wishes for a brief time.

This morning, though, he decides he’s going to come over. See Gavin and make him talk for longer than a few minutes. Tell him he isn’t going anywhere. Maybe kiss him. Connor thinks about that a lot.

He lies awake at night, texting Gavin, imagining Gavin beside him saying the words out loud. And then he imagines leaning over Gavin and silencing his stupid jokes with little kisses and feeling Gavin smile against his lips. He thinks about it when he’s at work, daydreaming about better things.

_ Tonight. _

When he gets off work. Tonight. Just a few more hours now.

  
  


He doesn’t leave the house very often in the two weeks following his visit with Alice. He doesn’t really want to. It sounds like a horrible thing, leaving the only place that feels comfortable. But he still needs his things, so he waits until the sun is low and the people have gone into bars or disappeared back home and will leave the shops devoid of impatient mothers and angry businessmen so he can stock up on junk food and microwavable pizzas since his energy to cook has dropped so low.

Gavin is walking to the store when it happens, though.

When he realizes what a mistake it was.

The stranger is demanding his wallet, telling him to hand it over while he holds a knife glinting against the moonlight. Pointing at him with such a terrifying, menacing look that his hands shake when he pulls the wallet from his pocket.

_ There’s barely anything in there— _

_ Shut the fuck up. Hand it over. _

So he does.

He does but it falls. It falls and the stranger looks at Gavin like he’s the most disgusting creature on this street.

_ You think this is a fucking game? Pick it up. _

Pick it up—

Of course he will.

So he does. Leaning down, picking the wallet up. His fingers grace the edges of it when the knee hits his face. When he’s sent backward. He’s hitting the brick wall when he realizes that the stranger is familiar. Not in any other sense that Gavin feels like he is looking at himself a couple years ago. Maybe even a couple months. But he looks just like Gavin knows he looked when Connor was in that archive room, telling him that he was making a mistake.

_ Don’t do it, Gavin. _

But he did it anyway.

He fired the gun just like this guy is sinking the knife into his stomach, hitting his head back against the wall. Kicking him when he’s down. It doesn’t matter what pleas are being told. This is an angry, volatile creature that just wants to hurt, kill, destroy.

So he does.

Just like Gavin had.

And this is all Gavin ever wanted, wasn’t it?

To die?

So he takes it. He lets the guy kick him, punch him, pull his hair. He feels the blade stab him a second time, just beside the first. He knows he should be fighting. He knows he should be doing something other than looking blurry eyed at this stranger tearing him apart, but he can’t.

His eyes start to slip closed. He hears the knife clatter to the ground, sees his wallet picked up from the ground and the sound of footsteps retreating. He thinks of Connor falling against the console in the archive room, one bullet to the skull. Dead. Giving up so easily.

He thinks of his fist landing against Connor’s jaw, the bones bruised, Connor’s hand on his, doing its best to massage the pain away.

He thinks about how he never asked Connor if he was okay, so consumed by his own pain.

He thinks of Connor bandaging his fingers, kissing his cheek, telling him that it will be okay.

He thinks of Connor and he forces himself to get up, one painful movement at a time, one agonizing step forward.

_ Connor. _

  
  


“C-Connor?”

He turns away from Tina, his words dying on his tongue as he finds Gavin at the doorway to the station. Standing with blood on his face, with his arm clutched to his chest, with raspy breaths and glazed-over eyes.

“Gavin?”

“I… I didn’t know…” he says, his words slurring together. “I don’t know where to go.”

Connor leaves Tina’s side, rushing fast towards Gavin, trying to find all of the major wounds on him. Broken ribs, broken arm, a cut on his forehead deep and bleeding. Probably a concussion. He needs stitches. He’s bleeding out. He hears Tina dialing 911 behind but he’s already sending out a message for an ambulance by the time he reaches Gavin’s side, catching him as he stumbles forward.

“Gavin, can you hear me?”

“Hmm,” he mumbles quietly. “I said.. I promised you. Right? I promised you.”

“What did you promise me?” he whispers.

“That I’d live for you. I almost gave up. I wanted to give up. I still want to give up.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. For you.”

“Because you promised me?” he whispers, his hands pressed over the wound on his side, holding in all that blood.

“Yes. No.”

“No?”

“I love you,” he says quietly. “I just… wanted to live long enough to tell you.”

“Well, you aren’t going to die,” Connor says. “So you can tell me again later, okay?”

“You s-said you could only lie to yourself for so long.”

“What?”

“Is it later?” Gavin asks. “Is this later?”

“Gavin—”

“It’ll have to do.”

“Stop. Shut up.”

“I still love you. It’s—It’s all I have left.”

  
  


_ The earth is not a cold, dead place. _

_ The earth is not a cold, dead place. _

_ The earth is not a cold, dead place. _

They used to listen to the album on repeat.  _ Explosions in the Sky.  _ Laying side by side on her bedroom floor, eyes closed, blocking everything out.

_ The earth is not a cold, dead place. _

She told him once that it was her favorite piece of music. She couldn’t listen to just one track. She had to listen to it all. She had to consume the entire album at once, swallowing it whole. It was the only way.

_ The earth is not a cold, dead place. Gavin. Do you know what that means? _

_ Sure I do. _

_ It means we have to look for the good. _

_ Okay. _

_ Do you know how to look for the good, Gavin? _

No.

But he told her he did.

He lied to her and said he could manage it.

But the only good he ever saw in the world was her kindness towards him, in the jokes Tina shared with him, in the stories about Chris’ kid growing up, in Connor’s smile, in his hands, his warmth, his sincerity.

_ The earth is not a cold, dead place. _

But what if  _ he  _ is?

What if he is just a cold, dead person?

  
  


There is a fear that he won’t wake up. They told him it was a possibility. Some people simply never wake up again. They go under for surgery, they don’t come back. But Connor does. Every day. He quits his job at the DPD three days later like he had already planned and sits by the bed. He holds Gavin’s hand, he talks. He tells Gavin about his new job. Working with pets. Not a fancy place by any means, but they take in strays when they can. Connor is in charge of walking them. Gives them little booties in the winter so they don’t freeze their paws. He feeds the medicine to the cats who will bare their teeth at him and fight.

And he takes care of them.

In ways he cannot take care of Gavin.

“There’s a cat at the shelter that I think you should adopt. Little scrawny black thing. Feisty. I think she’d be perfect for you. So you have to come back. For her.”

Nothing. Nothing at all. The doctors can only say for certain that there’s brain activity. That he might be able to hear Connor when he talks. He hopes he can. He hopes when he tells Gavin he loves him that he can hear it, even if it’s a horrible way to tell him for the first time. Half dead and waiting to either get up or turn to sleep for the rest of his life.

The problem is—

Connor knows Gavin. He knows how much he just wants to sleep for the rest of his life.

  
  


He makes his way through the cemetery to every grave, setting a bundle of tulips on each one. Connor isn’t quite sure if it’s the right flower to take to a grave, but he likes them. They seem soft and delicate. Pale white, gleaming against the green of the leaves, the gray of the stone. It is not a good day to be outside. Despite the fact that it isn’t downpouring, his clothes are soaked before he exits the cemetery and makes his way back to his car. Stays there in shelter from the steady pitter-patter against his windshield. Gray skies, gray headstones, gray hoodie, gray interiors.

Before today he might’ve said he liked the color gray. Found comfort in it, even. Because it could be warm, because it reminded him of Hank’s hair, or the cat at the shelter who always chirps at him when he steps inside. Gray like Gavin’s car. People think black is the color of mourning though, and they’re wrong. It’s gray. It finds every crevice of the cemetery and fills it up. It finds every part of someone’s life and infects it. Diseased and rotting. Not black. Black would be a void that he would be grateful to fall into. Black like the void that Gavin has found.

He doesn’t know why it makes him angry, but he starts the car and drives to the hospital in a fury, slamming his door behind him, walking fast into the hospital building. He knows his way around this place too well. Goes wandering when he can’t bear to leave and can’t bear to stay and look at Gavin still weak and sleeping in his bed.

“You have to wake up,” he says, closing the door behind him. “Or you’ll be just like her. You know that, don’t you? That if you stay asleep, if you stay gone, you’ll be just like her. Abandoning someone who cares about you. You said you loved me and then you left me and you’re just—gone. And you won’t come back. And how am I supposed to cope with that? Losing you? How am I supposed to feel? You told me so often how much she hurt you and you’re just doing the same thing over again. Just leaving. You’re a piece of shit. Hypocritical bastard. I hate you so much sometimes. It’s the same stupid ache I get when I think about how much I love you. And you’re gone and I can’t keep begging for you to come back and yet I still do. Every night. Every morning. I keep hoping now is when you’ll come back to me, but you won’t. You never will, will you? And I’ll just be stuck living the rest of my life feeling like a broken idiot waiting for you to come back.”

Nothing.

Just the whir of machines.

Just Gavin sleeping away.

Connor moves forward, takes Gavin’s hand, slides into the chair. He knows he’s crying. He can’t help it. He cries so often these days he would think his system wouldn’t be able to generate any more tears, but it does.

He thinks about never coming back to this hospital. Never seeing Gavin again. Not spending his afternoons here. Find a way to fix himself and be normal and not have this weight pressing down on his shoulders telling him that Gavin is one of the most important people in his life. Important like Tina and Chris and Ben. If any of them were in this situation, he’d be here, too, holding their hands, crying. He’d be waiting. He’d never give up. He can’t help but wonder if maybe it would be a fraction easier if it was anyone but Gavin, though, and if he would take that fraction just to save him.

He wouldn’t.

He wants Gavin back. He doesn’t want to lose anyone else in the process.

“Wake up, idiot,” he whispers. “Wake up and tell me you love me again. I can’t have the last time be you dying, okay? So just wake up.”

_ Nothing. _

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  
  


How long is he supposed to wait?

How long is he supposed to wait for someone to come back for him?

It’s—

Stupid.

To blame him. It’s not his fault. But if Connor was there, he could’ve stopped it. If Connor hadn’t found a way to hide every fraction of himself from Gavin, he could’ve let them be together. He could’ve been by his side. He could’ve stopped it.

It’s Hank all over again--

If he had just  _ been there. _

But he wasn’t.

And now he’s wondering why he wasted what little time they have left.

  
  


“Do you think it’s a bad thing?” Tina asks quietly. “That we’re holding on?”

“No.”

“Do you think it’s a good thing?”

Connor glances up from the counter. Vegetables sprawled across the space, cut up into neat little dices. A pan sizzling behind him. A recipe passed from Gavin to Tina and from Tina to Connor. The closest he can get to him now.

“No,” he decides. “And yet no one is going to stop us, are they?”

“I would hate them if they did.”

“Me too,” he whispers quietly. He’s thought about it enough. Stopping. It’s been a month. Not early enough to decide to quit, but he thought about if this happened a year from now. If he stopped going to see Gavin because he’d truly given up. And that’s the thing. Not going means he’s given up. He’s not going to give up. He’s not giving up on Gavin at all. He’d hate himself for that.

And if Gavin died—

He’d have another person to visit on his weekly trips to the cemetery.

He’d rather not think about that, though. When he visits those girls, he is already thinking of the wrong person. Not the life they lost, not the killer who took them, but Gavin laying in his bed looking so peaceful.

  
  


Connor adopts the cat. He names her Mocha. She tries to fight Sumo and wins, mostly because Sumo barely even blinks an eye at her. She paws at his nose and then runs the other direction, taking over a basket of clothes as her new bed. He doesn’t stop her. He just lays on the ground between the dog sleeping by the couch and the cat in the basket and he stares at the ceiling and he waits.

Waits for something.

  
  


“Hello?”

“It’s Gavin. You should come to the hospital. Quick.”

_ Quick.  _ As if he needs to be told.

  
  


He isn’t listening to the doctor. He’s looking through the glass window at the bed. Staring at the sheets and the blanket all messed up. The pillow that has fallen to the floor. He is thinking about how he wishes he was here when it happened and not getting the phone call on his way home from work. He is thinking of how much he wishes he wasn’t wearing a soggy uniform weighed down by the storm. He is thinking about how much he wishes he had an umbrella today.

He is numb and lost but when the doctor finally leaves, he moves automatically, pushing the door open to the room, stepping inside slowly. His shoes squeak on the ground. His clothes are stuck to his body. He feels like he is about to fall. One wrong move and he will surely crumble.

“Connor?”

He tries to nod, tries to mumble something that sounds like he’s listening, but he can’t.

“Hey, are you alright?”

_ No. _

He takes another few steps forward, his feet feeling like they are dragging against the tile. He reaches forward, touching his face, running his hands along the curves of his cheekbones, his jaw.

“It’s okay,” he whispers. “I’m up now.”

Connor nods, thinking of how stupid it is that Gavin is comforting him right now instead of the other way. But he can’t speak. It feels fake. It feels like a dream. Gavin is awake. Talking. Sitting up. He’ll need physical therapy—regain some of the muscle he lost while he was asleep. Tina told him that when Gavin first woke, he tried to get up out of bed, slipped and fell on the floor because his legs couldn’t handle his weight anymore. Connor hadn’t noticed. It’d been such a slow thing. All of Gavin’s muscle fading away, bit by bit.

“You’re here,” he manages.

Gavin nods, “I’m here. You can call me an idiot all you want to my face now.”

“And I can tell you I love you.”

A smile breaks across his face. So reminiscent of the days when Gavin could joke and laugh and didn’t just lay there with the same slack expression, “Yeah. You could if you wanted.”

“I do,” Connor whispers. “I want to.”

Gavin’s hands press against his side, pulling him a little closer. “Then do it.”

He is tracing every shape of Gavin’s face. A line down his nose, a brush across his lips. Making sure he’s here. His Gavin. His grouchy ex-detective. Stupid idiot.

“I love you.”

  
  


Connor goes to the first few sessions of Gavin’s physical therapy before he is waved off and asked not to return. Then, a week after him being gone, Gavin asks him to come back. It is a cycle that Connor can’t really understand. Leaving and coming back again. When he’s discharged from the hospital, he stays with Tina. When she quit the DPD, she got a job doing data entry. She invites Connor over almost every day and he accepts. Sometimes Chris is there. Mostly he isn’t. But she works from home and when Gavin needs someone to help him, her schedule allows for more than a couple hours.

Connor only comes over when Gavin asks. He is too hesitant otherwise. He remembers how angry Gavin was during the first therapy session. Exhausted and broken and defeated. His legs wouldn’t cooperate. His arms and hands just as weak but the control comes back quicker. More practice. He just doesn’t want to cross a line.

But when he does come over, he sits beside Gavin on the couch, watches movies with him, makes him popcorn only to have pieces thrown at him during the film. Every single one that hits him, Gavin places a kiss on the place. Gentle and soft like he’s just as afraid as Connor is.

It doesn’t go away slowly. And Gavin doesn’t remember everything that Connor told him. It would be impossible. He remembers the cat, but he doesn’t remember Connor’s new job. And when he meets Mocha, he loves her. An instant connection. She’s still so small. Fragile little thing.

When Connor spends his first night at Tina’s place, the two of them take up every inch of the small bed. Gavin holds his hand, traces along the lines in his palm, matching their fingers up side by side. They’re bandaged up again. That hasn’t gone away, but Connor is used to it. Skin and cloth against his hand. It’s part of Gavin. He wouldn’t shove him away just because of it.

“I don’t remember it,” Gavin whispers.

“What?”

“Getting stabbed. I don’t remember it. I don’t remember…” he trails off. “I don’t remember coming to you. Tina said I did. I don’t remember that.”

“Probably better if you didn’t.”

“Yeah,” he says quietly. He turns, leaving a kiss on Connor’s shoulder. “Probably.”

Connor reaches out, his hand trailing along Gavin’s shirt, pulling it up. The wound is closed now. Just a scar. Gavin is alright. Gavin will be okay. But he runs his fingers along the scar anyway. Proof that it happened. Connor wonders if he took it away, what would happen. If it could change any of it. Gavin doesn’t have the memory but he has the scar and it’s all Connor can hope that he never uncovers that memory. They didn’t find the guy who did it. They probably never will.

Another thing to have in their life, then.

“Connor?”

“Hm?”

“Thank you for not giving up on me.”

“Of course not,” he whispers.

He never would.


End file.
